


Meeting at Night

by draculard



Category: When Darkness Loves Us - Elizabeth Engstrom
Genre: Body Horror, Drowning, F/F, Nightmares, Parent/Child Incest, Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-26
Updated: 2019-09-26
Packaged: 2020-10-28 20:08:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20784368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: Though she knows Sally Ann is gone, Cora still sees her daughter in her dreams.





	Meeting at Night

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the eponymous poem by Robert Browning.

After her husband dies, Cora keeps the curtains in their bedroom closed at all times of the day. They’re thick curtains — heavy and navy blue — and they keep out all the light, even at noon. When the girls were little, she made them matching winter dresses out of the same blue cloth, and when Sally Ann outgrew hers and Maggie refused to wear it, Cora turned the remnants of the dress into a cardigan so Sally Ann could keep wearing it even as an adult.

Only Sally Ann never really got to be an adult, did she? Cora bites her lip and pushes the curtains back, staring down at the fields, at the old slave tunnels, at the boarded-up well. This is a treacherous though; Sally Ann  _ did _ get to be an adult, she tells herself. Sally Ann  _ is _ an adult, and she’s successful somewhere, and she’s very happy out there. She ran away. She isn’t dead.

Sally Ann, her eldest, prettiest, most resilient daughter. The one who got all of Cora’s best qualities, and all of her husband’s. 

Cora closes the curtains again.

* * *

At night, she has the strangest dreams. The creature crawling into bed with her is unrecognizable: its eyes are filmy blue, its gums black, its scalp peeling and covered in wispy strands of hair. Some sort of disease has eaten away the cartilage in its nose, leaving two mucus-filled slits in a rotting pit.

Its limbs are small and wasted. Its ribcage protrudes a bit too far, digging into Cora as it lies atop her.

Its breathing syncs with hers.

Their heartbeats are the same.

And the smell of it fills Cora’s lungs as she stares up at the ceiling, breathing shallowly, wishing the darkness would abate for just a second so she could see anything other than that creature’s pale skin. 

It reaches for her. Its fingers find Cora’s jar and work their way up to her cheekbones, then to her eyes. It seems so weak that Cora doesn’t even think to defend herself, not until the creature’s thumbs are pressing down into her eyes with an iron strength that Cora has no hope of fighting.

She feels something pop beneath her eyelids.

She hears herself howling.

She feels something thick and greasy sliding down her cheeks from her empty sockets.

_ Mother, _ the creature says.

* * *

She wakes in the dark. She can see nothing. She touches her closed eyelids and feels the bulge of her eyeballs underneath: intact. Her cheeks are clean, with no dried residue of a ruptured eye upon them.

All she can hear are her own rasping breaths.

* * *

Something pulls her into the well — that’s the next nightmare she has.

She’s walking along the line where the trees meet the fields, and it’s early winter, and everything is barren. By all means, she should see the well before she reaches it, but the grass is long and dead and brown, and the old rotten boards are covered up by debris from the harvest.

She feels the ground shift beneath her. She hears a creak. 

_ Grass doesn’t creak, _ she thinks, and then the boards break. She falls down nearly six inches, ankles jarring as she hits the layer of concrete beneath the wood, pitching forward so that her palms land right in a patch of dead thistles.

She’s stepping out, one foot back on the grass, when someone grabs her foot and pulls her back. The concrete crumbles beneath her; she scrabbles at the brick walls as she falls down them, into the dark, her fingernails catching on the cracks, bending backward, ripping off — the most terrible smell invades her lungs, dank and putrid and loamy, and she feels insects skittering over her hands, and the entire time there are those bony fingers wrapped around her foot.

Pulling her down. 

_ Mother, _ the creature says.

* * *

She surfaces from the dream and still can’t see anything. She stumbles to the curtains, pulls them back, and for just a moment it’s so dark outside that she can’t see anything there, either. Then the details come out — she notices the stars in the sky, growing less and less faint the longer she stands there. The clouds shift, revealing a tiny sliver of the moon.

Cora feels as though a weight has lifted from her shoulders. She takes the sash and ties the curtain back, letting light into her room.

She goes back to bed.

* * *

The water in her mouth tastes coppery, thick, corrupted. Beneath the more important sensation of burning in her lungs, she can feel algae coating her tongue, threatening to choke her if the water doesn’t. 

When she breaks through, at first she can’t tell whether she’s still drowning or not. She wipes the water from her eyes; tentatively, she takes a breath and finds the air musty-smelling but present. 

But she can’t see a thing.

_ The slave tunnels, _ she thinks, and hysteria sets on her like a wild animals. Her quick, desperate breaths become sobs, bubbling and clotting her throat. She brushes her hair back from her forehead so it will stop dripping in her eyes, trying to get herself under control. Swim for shore — that’s the thing to do. Swim in one direction until she finds land. 

She sets out in a breast stroke but keeps her face out of the water, too nervous to put it back in, too frightened of the algae that still feels like it’s bristling in her esophagus.

She makes it about a yard before she runs into someone.

Someone small and cold. Someone with scabby skin covered in bumps and rashes, pits and open wounds. Yelping, Cora pushes away, her feet centering on the other person’s hips as she launches herself off.

They grab her and pull her back.

_ Mother,  _ the creature whispers, and there are hands on Cora’s arms, pinning her in place, dragging her under. Hands on her hips, hands on her thighs. Hands ripping at her clothes, exposing her breasts. Hands questing between her legs and someone laughing when she flinches.

She feels chapped, peeling lips against her skin and starts to cry in earnest, unable to help it. Her body temperature skyrockets, desperately compensating for the cold water, for the creature’s cold skin. 

It feels like a fever is consuming Cora, killing her faster than she can drown.

* * *

She wakes for the third time that night, breathing hard, sweating beneath her blankets. She kicks them away.

_ Just a dream,  _ she tells herself, and she looks to the windows, where the shining of the moon will soothe her, where the distant constellations will distract her with their winking, where the light will draw the darkness away.

The curtains are drawn again.

The sash is gone.

She feels fingers creeping up her thigh.

_ Mother, _ the creature says.


End file.
